January 2007

• Manoj Chaudhury, the Franklin J. Howes Jr. distinguished professor of Chemical Engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society for “conducting fundamental studies on the roles of energetic and kinetic processes on adhesion, fracture, and tribological properties of polymeric interfaces.” Chaudhury has published more than 80 peer reviewed papers in leading scientific journals and he holds several patents.
• The International peer-reviewed journal founded two years ago by Daniel M. Frangopol, holder of Lehigh’s Fazlur Rahman Khan Chair of Structural Engineering & Architecture, has just been accepted into the ISI Science Citation Index. Frangopol was also recently recognized by the International Association for Information Processing (IFIP), in recognition of "outstanding contributions…to promote modern structural reliability and optimization theory and advance international cooperation in the field of structural system reliability and optimization theory."
• Mayuresh Kothare, the R.L. McCann associate professor of Chemical Engineering and co-director of the Center for Chemical Process Modeling and Control, has been promoted to the level of Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It is rare for a chemical engineer to be named to such a body within a professional society of electrical engineers; this demonstrates the highly interdisciplinary nature of Kothare’s work in control systems.
• Charalambos A. Marangos was recently named associate director of Lehigh University’s Center for Engineering Logistics and Distribution (CELDi), sponsored by the National Science Foundation. CELDi’s mission is to promote cooperation between industry and academia in the areas of distribution, transportation, information technology, manufacturing, maintenance and consulting. At Lehigh, a key focus of the center is to help companies use logistics and distribution systems to become more agile and productive. The center also seeks to utilize Lehigh’s experience in working with industry and the Lehigh Valley’s attractiveness to companies involved with logistics, distribution and manufacturing.
• Researchers from Lehigh’s Energy Research Center (ERC) continued to set the pace at the recent 2006 International Technical Conference on Coal Utilization and Fuel Systems. At the conference, ERC researchers taught a tutorial, chaired two technical sessions and presented three papers. Nenad Sarunac, ERC associate director and principal research engineer and scientist, taught a tutorial titled “Artificial Neural Networks and Process Optimization.” Sarunac also chaired new technical sessions on “Opportunities and Barriers of Energy Efficiency Improvement” and on “Innovations for Existing Power Plants.” Sarunac presented three papers that he co-authored with other ERC researchers and industrial partners, including Carlos Romero, ERC associate director and principal research engineer and scientist, industry partners Great River Energy Company Inc., and ERC graduate students Xiaodong Bian and Wei Zhan.
• Thomas Koch, professor of physics and director of the Center for Optical Technologies, presented an invited talk at the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society Annual Meeting Oct. 29 in Montreal, Canada. His presentation was a review talk on the rapidly evolving field of silicon photonics titled "Opportunities and Challenges in Silicon Photonics."
• John Spletzer, assistant professor of Computer Science & Engineering, demonstrated his research into robotic wheelchairs at the World Congress on Disabilities, Nov. 17-19 in Philadelphia. John is working with regional industrial concerns to develop this chair – which essentially will load itself into the back of a van after its owner has been seated in the vehicle – for sales and distribution early in 2007.

     

P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science
Lehigh University • Packard Laboratory, 19 Memorial Drive West, Bethlehem, PA 18015 • (610) 758-4025